John Deere Made a Plow from a Broken Saw Blade

When pioneer farmers reached the Illinois prairie, their cast-iron plows couldn’t handle that thick, sticky black soil. It kept clinging to the plow instead of turning over. In 1837, a blacksmith named John Deere in Grand Detour, Illinois, took steel from an old, broken sawmill blade, bent it over a log, and made the cutting part of a new plow. Its moldboard was polished smooth so the soil slid right off instead of sticking. It turned that hard ground and polished itself clean as it went. The plow worked so well that by 1846 Deere was selling almost a thousand a year, and by 1856 more than 13,000. That plow helped open the rich prairies to farming. Hard ground doesn’t get fruitful by wishing. Somebody has to break it up, and sometimes God does it with a broken blade.